Introduce Yourself!

Welcome to the Bb Learn Data Reporting User Group! Whether you have been using the ASR, OpenDB, and/or BIRT tools for years, or you are new to these reporting tools, we would like you to actively engage with Blackboard and other clients of the user community. The User Group will provide the opportunity to converse directly with other Managed Hosted clients that utilize ASR, OpenDB, BIRT and want to be able to use it better than they are now.

To start, please introduce yourself to your peers by responding to this discussion. When introducing yourself, please include the following:

Some experience using Eclipse and BIRT for custom B2 Development and more experienced with SQL.

The ability to create more complex Building Block projects, taking a step further from just getting-presenting a result set - but manipulating results and designing reports which Bb Admins and other users can benefit from.

My name is Mary Jane Blystone and I'm the Bb GUI Admin for Drake University here in lovely Des Moines, Iowa. I am programmer and I have used SQL previously. I am hoping to access to all of our Blackboard data so I can create all of the reports tat my CITO is asking ^_^

My official title is Instructional Technologist and my primary duty is assisting the faculty in using technology in their teaching. I am the primary Blackboard system administrator, and I provide all the user training on the system. Generating custom reports on our Learn system is a very small portion of what I do.

I took an SQL course in college years ago, but haven't used it much since. I have been a db admin in the past, but it's primarily been, and still is, Microsoft Access application development and, more recently, phpMyAdmin. I now have Oracle SQL Developer installed and connected to our Bb system. During the session today, I successfully ran my first query, based on a simple one presented in Up_and_Running_with_ASR.pdf.

I hope to find queries and/or B2s that others have written that I can use and get assistance writing queries that I can then share with the group.

Sharon Craig, Bb admin for past 10 years initially in Distance Education, moved to System Administrator in IT couple of years ago and manage multiple systems.

Rowan-Cabarrus Community College, Salisbury NC

Have ASR access for 7+ years and used SQL for over 15 years but I do not get to focus on reporting as much as I would like. I am the only admin at this time and have been for a while now. Currently have the 'if you don't use it, lose it' problem going on since I don't get to utilize my SQL skills as much as I would like with so many other constant and more urgent needs supporting Distance Ed and end users.

This ASR group / forum has always been a great resource and I am glad to see it continue. Looking to access resources, connect with other users of all levels for assistance and collaboration on more Bb reporting to help our institution. Would love to see the ASR table access expanded for managed hosting users and / or the cost of Open DB to come down. Would be nice to have more access to our own data without the added expense especially when implementing added Bb tools such as the hierarchy process. We use this extensively but have no access of to data without requesting from BtBb.

Some experience with ASR. I know enough SQL to be dangerous, and to take someone else's query and adapt it to my needs. I would love to have open DB and I also would like to learn more about BIRT

To keep updating my knowledge of ASR and SQL. To meet fun people from around the globe who are using Blackboard and learn about the solutions that they have come up with to address our common data needs.

We moved from locally hosted to Managed Hosting this spring/summer, and after being used to extracting any information we needed from the database before, we're trying to figure out how much of that we can get via ASR (and other tools). Also, I'm slowly learning to write queries in Oracle SQL instead of MS SQL...

I've been working with the Blackboard database for a few years, extracting data and running reports as needed. I've played with BIRT briefly and it's been on my to-do list to implement some of our queries as BIRT reports but haven't had time. Lately I've also been working with Analytics for Learn.

Interested in hearing what others are working on with regards to reporting

It sounds like you are just getting started with ASR. Is that right? If so, you need to begin by making sure you have a permanent internet address on your computer. That means your computer can't use DHCP or wireless (I think) to get onto the Internet. You have to be assigned a permanent internet address. For example, it might be 128.171.178.114 or something like that. It can't be a 192.168.x.x or a 10.x.x.x address (where x can be any number), since those are local addresses, not "real" addresses. You will have to work with your local network people to get that accomplished.

When you think you are ready, open a browser, go to http://whatismyip.com and see whether the right IP number is reported. If it isn't, go back through the process again until the number you are assigned shows up.

Let me know when you have completed that first step.

Then you will request access to ASR by creating a ticket on Behind the Blackboard. You will provide the IP address of your computer, since Blackboard will have to set up access through their firewall for your computer. I can help you when you are ready for this step.

To start, please introduce yourself to your peers by responding to this discussion. When introducing yourself, please include the following:

Your Name - George Finkle

Your Institution - Henderson State University

A brief description of your role - Senior Instructional Applications Administrator, I am the little bald man behind the green velvet curtain that keeps the show going!

Your comfort level and/or experience with any of the ASR, OpenDB, and/or BIRT tools - I have absolutely no experience with ASR, OpenDB, or BIRT and this is causing me a great deal of discomfort.

Name one thing you hope to learn from the user group - for starters: how to get started! I have downloaded DBeaver, I have received the access data from Bb Learn but I am stuck at the second half of the first step. Help?

Welcome! You are the reason I am part of this group. Years ago I struggled through the "getting started" process. I am here to help you, and anyone, get to the point where you are able to execute a SQL query and receive the results. I am not associated with Blackboard, like Isaiah and Joel are. Once you are all set up, they and others will wow you with the many things you can (and can't) do with ASR, OpenDB, and BIRT. So let's begin on your "getting started" journey.

You said you have the access data from Blackboard. I assume that is your host address, port, database name, user name and password. Is that right?

Have you created a connection in DBeaver using that information, or do you need help with that?

Hello Bill! Thank you for the post. I have been working with Joel Diamant on this. He is awesome! I do have my credentials, a static IP address, and a port. . . actually, I seem to have two port numbers. I'm trying to resolve that issue between Bb Learn Support and my IT department. My IT department is working on getting the port open on the firewall. There seems to be an issue with that. I am not using DBeaver, I'm using SQL Developer. Joel was a tremendous help in getting SQLD and the correct version of Java set up for me - I would never have gotten this far without him. Bill, from your perspective, what is the advantage of using DBeaver over SQL Developer? I'm waiting on a reply from my IT people to let me know about the port issue. . . George

George, I don't see any real advantage of DBeaver over SQLDeveloper. I started on SQL Developer and then switched to DBeaver around a year ago when one of the Blackboard people said they were using it and liked it. I think DBeaver was easier to set up, but that could be because I was more experienced when I started using it. There are probably lots of technical differences between them, but I barely scratch the surface of what they offer. I just create a query and get the results. You can do that in either.

Bill, thank you for the reply, I appreciate it. I am a complete novice at this. After consulting with Joel Diamant (bless his heart for putting up with me), we decided that SQL Developer was the best way to go for me. I had a lot of trouble with getting started with DBeaver. Now, all I need is help getting the GUI in SQL Developer to do what I want. I do not want to run "deluxe" queries. All I want to do right now is get a simple list of users and a simple list of courses. I can build on that skill set once I have it. George

My role is one of three LMS Administrators. We're relatively new and developing a core set of competencies using ASR and OpenDB. Our first set of reports from OpenDB came out late last year. It's getting exciting! Over the years, I've worked with Bb in a variety of roles including faculty, student, course designer, etc. I love online learning! The freedom it brings to the world is inspiring. I try to bring my experiences to the team and help us improve how we position and support the tool.

I hope to gain more experience using both ASR and OpenDB to that we can share insights with our campus.

BB data has been largely considered inaccessible by my institution for a long time, so I'm here to see what I can build and remind myself of all the growing pains that come with learning an unfamiliar schema! User Groups are such a powerful learning resource so I'm excited to start participating in this community!

I have not used ASR. In my previous institution I had no ASR access. I have 25+ year’s experience in programming, DB design & admin using MSSQL, Oracle SQL, and others.

Learn how to access ASR, BIRT, OpenDB. Get acquainted with DB Schema(s), run SQL queries and create custom report for our portion of data from the AF enterprise. I am working on securing a device with a permanent IP address as required to setup ASR. What other software needs to be pre-installed on the machine (i.e., Oracle SQL Developer/SQL Management Studio, ?)

Please take a look a the Behind the Blackboard Article # 000043604 for more information on requesting ASR. It'll provide you with the necessary information to get started. But for the most part a public IP is required, from there you are free to choice which SQL Client you'd like to use, so long as it can create an Oracle Connection.

In terms of learning the Database Schema, our Open Database Schema on our help.blackboard.com is extremely useful, I reference it all the time when troubleshooting issues.

It'll have a lot more table information in that schema then what you'll have access to in ASR, but it is still a good reference for understanding the relationships between tables.

If your end goal is to develop Birt Reports that are deployable to Learn so that users with GUI access can run particular reports, having access to a full dev environment will be key. So I would also recommend down the road downloading our Developer Machine, which can be found on Behind the Blackboard. That will provide you with a Vagrant standalone dev environment which you can use to develop b2s and/or work out more complex queries. The database there is Postgres, so there may be slightly differences in certain sql usage.

The most recent Presentation I gave, last Thrusday actually covers getting started with ASR, so you may want to reference that to give you an idea.

Charles Sturt University, Albury, NSW, Australia [inland, on the border of the states of NSW & Victoria]

I rejoice under the title Adaptive Learning and Teaching Analyst: I create dashboards and analyse Bb Learning (and other learning and teaching) analytics.

I got given access to a cut-down version of the Open DB schema as part of our analytics for learn implementation. I have already used it to extract discussion forum posts, look for duplicate/missing Grade Centre columns, and some other content queries. Still a novice. But I've used this group to help me already.

I'd like to learn more about what I can do, as well as establish a sense of community as Bb data reporting alone can be lonely at times in a regional city. I'd like to extract data, copy to Excel and create Tableau dashboards from it too, particularly where I can't get the data from analytic's Pyramid tool.